How to Paint a Brick Fireplace

This post is about 8 months overdue!  Once we had our den walls painted, I knew our fireplace had to be painted as well.  It was a dark red brick with matching grout, and it would stick out like a sore thumb in this pretty new room.  I love the look of brick though, so I used a technique that would keep that authentic look.  Here are the details!

First, I painted the entire fireplace with primer.  I just used what we had on hand, which was Zinsser 123 Plus.  

While I was painting, this was my view.  Homeownership can be exhausting!  :)

Then I painted the base color, or the grout color.  I bought 4 colors for this project- a grout color (light tan), and 3 shades of brown for a good variation. For all of these, I used samples from Sherwin Williams.   For the bricks, I simply cut a sponge to the exact size of a brick and varied the placement of the different shades.  I also layered the colors on top of each other (I would sponge on the dark brown, then sponge a lighter shade on top, and vice versa.)  The trick is to create a variety of shades to look like real brick.

So I wouldn't have too much paint on the sponge, I used a brush to lightly apply paint.  Don't push down too hard on the sponge, so you get that nice speckled look!

This project took less than a day and was very inexpensive- just a couple of sponges and 4 paint samples!